The demographic decline no longer affects only the countries where well-being is more wide-spread. It is a global phenomenon, spanning every continent. And if it continues to a pace according to current dynamics, in 2100 only 6 countries in the world will still reach a fertility rate of 2.1 child-ren per woman, the so-called “replacement threshold” which allo-ws them to keep their population stable.
This is supported by a new study based on statistical models and published by the British scie-ntific journal Lancet. This is a demographic analysis on the gigantic amount of data from the Global Burden of Disease, Injuries and Risk Factors Study, carried out by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation of the University of Washington.
Precisely those scientific circles that have long shouted about the “demographic bomb”, therefore, today send out exactly the opposite message: births are dra-stically reducing on a global level. By combining thousands of studies relating to demographic dynamics in 204 countries with sophisticated systems, they certify not only that the fertility rate at a global level has halved in the last seventy years, falling from 4.84 in 1950 to 2.23 in 2021.
The most interesting data from the research published by the Lancet concerns the dynamics taking place in individual geographical areas. Because if on the one hand the slowdown (which exists) follo-ws a slower pace in sub-Saharan Africa, the collapse in the birth rate in South Asia would make the difference in the coming years.
According to these project-ions, countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are on track to very quickly reach the low birth rates of Western Europe and the Far East. If in 2021 there were a total of 32 million births in South Asia, by 2050 they could already drop to 18.7 million.